The cost of mobilization ran into millions.
Suppose war did not come after all, how were those millions to be met?
Lord Haldane brushed aside every consideration of this kind.
Mobilization was to be pushed on, cost what it might.

He had not studied his Moltke to no profit.
On leaving the War Office that same day, after having mobilized the British Army, he went across to the Foreign Office and was there stopped by a certain soldier who asked him how many divisions he was sending to France.

Lord Haldane very naturally rebuked this person for asking such a question, telling him that war was not yet declared and that therefore perhaps no divisions at all would go to France.
Never was a just reproof more fatal to him who administered it.
I believe this soldier went straight off to an important Civil Servant with the sensational news that Lord Haldane was holding back the Expeditionary Force, and afterwards carried the same false news to one of the most violent anti-German publicists in London, a frenzied person who enjoys nevertheless a certain power in Unionist circles.

In a few hours it was all over London that the Liberals were going to desert France, that Lord Haldane, a friend of the German Kaiser, had got back to the War Office, and that he was preventing mobilization.
I am quite willing to believe that the snubbed soldier honestly thought he was spreading a true story: I am sure that the frenzied publicist believed this story with all the lunatic fervour of his utterly untrained and utterly intemperate mind; but what I cannot bring myself to believe for a moment is that the Unionist statesman to whom this story was taken, and who there and then gave orders for a campaign against Lord Haldane, was inspired by any motive less immoral, less cynical, and less disgraceful to a man of honour than a desire for office.
He saw the opportunity of discrediting the Liberal Government through Lord Haldane and took it.

The Cabinet was to fall under suspicion because one of its members could be accused of pro-Germanism.